Otávio Mattos

I have a bachelor degree in Social Sciences (having focused on Social and Cultural Anthropology) from the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), a master degree in Cognition and Human Evolution from the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain) and another master degree in Cognitive Science and Language from the Universistat de Barcelona (Spain). Throughout my undergraduate studies, I also lived for a year in Madrid and studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid — where I officially enrolled in the courses of Paleoanthropology, Genetics of Behavior and Paleontology, and took classes in Zooarqueology and Experimental Arqueology as an auditing student. Furthermore, in this year I also took part of the excavations in the paleonthological and arqueological site of Atapuerca (Burgos), directed by Dr. Juan Luis Arsuaga, Dr. José María Bermúdez de Castro and Dr. Eudald Carbonell Roura.

My interests are interdisciplinary and involve subjects areas like developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and linguistics. Specifically, I research the relations between the faculty of language and the capacity to acquire cultural knowledge from communication from a developmental and evolutionary perspective.

Since September of 2013, I’ve been a researcher of the Grammar and Cognition Group of the Universitat de Barcelona. Currently I’m researching the development of language both in typically developing children and children on the autism spectrum, and the kinds of knowledge that they can acquire and transmit through communication in light of their linguistic stage.